What Next?

Stop And Sniff The Roses . . . And Fish . . . And Rotting Toes

March 18, 1997|By Charles M. Madigan, Tribune Staff Writer.

"Take a deep breath, and imagine living with 15,000 other smelly Tudors in this city of Norwich. Your nostrils are bombarded with all kinds of unsavory and fetid smells. The streets are overflowing with stinking filth, the open drains are a festering stream of murky mud, pig manure and cattle dung are piled up high and buzzing with flies."

We now know this because of Mary Dobson and her new children's books, which offer scratch-n-sniff olfactory experiences so readers can know all the worst smells, and some of the best ones, of three distinct periods in English history.

There will always be an England, of course, but it won't always smell as badly as it did in the days of the Roman Empire, during the Tudor era or during the pungent days of Queen Victoria's long, stinky reign.

Public bathrooms, this book proves beyond any doubt, have always had a terrible scent, undoubtedly a consolation for those who thought the pong attached to, uh ... poop (not to put too fine a point on it) was unique to public johns in Chicago or New York or second-rate, Third-World hotels.

The "Smelly History" series from Oxford University Press includes three entries at this point: "Roman Aromas," "Tudor Odours" and "Victorian Vapours." They will be on sale in Britain later this month and in the United States around the end of the year.

It is not all bad.

There are some flowers that smell quite nice along with some chocolate that smells good.

Everything else smells like, well, something that either died and was left sitting in the sun, or something we might flush away today without a thought, or horrid combinations of those things mixed together and cooked up in that special way that makes you want to hurl.

The Romans, we are told, took to washing their tunics in urine. The people who ran the cleaning businesses collected the urine, then stomped on the clothing in vats of it.

We can scratch and sniff the result, duplicated through the magic of chemistry.

Celts, it is said, frequently crammed the heads of their dead enemies on sticks and left them to rot in the sun.

That we can smell too.

It goes on and on, from the sublime scent of lavender, crammed up the noses of plague victims in an attempt to revive them, to notes that sailors were wretched scurvy knaves whose teeth fell out from bad nutrition and who had, in Tudor times, a complete collection of festering sores, bug infestations and, not surprisingly, very bad breath.

All of this is actually serious stuff and aimed at adding another dimension to the teaching of history. Dobson is a senior research officer at the Wellcome Unit for the History of Medicine at the University of Oxford. She is an expert on the history of epidemics. Her latest big-league science book is "Contours of Death and Disease in Early Modern England," by Cambridge University Press.

During the course of her research on disease, she stumbled across many descriptions of just how bad life smelled over the centuries and decided a way had to be found to combine health education, history and actual scents.

But that might just be the taint of American values. Stink has such a bad name in the United States that everyone goes to great lengths to disguise anything malodorous.

Bathrooms smell like flowery fields; cars have little cardboard trees that impart fresh scents. There is deodorant for shoes and armpits, scented powders for various private parts and catamenial products with the aroma of strawberries and the like.

Not so for the Brits, apparently.

They are a braver people, as a history of any of these eras might describe them, full of determination and olfactory stamina.

In addition to the scents described, these books include scratch-and-sniff segments on what Henry VIII's left foot, with its rotted toe, might have smelled like, along with a lot of "going to the bathroom" scenes across history, just to let everyone know how it happened back then.

But it's not all disgusting.

There's love too.

The Tudor book notes that lovers would often exchange love apples as signs of affection.

Here's how to make your own love apple:

Take an apple. Put it under your arm until it is soaked in sweat and has absorbed enough of the same to impart a scent.

Swap it with a loved one and any time you feel a longing, just sniff it!